Rules & regulations 
TECHNICAL BULLETIN 2015

Active development of oil & gas reserves all over the world including Arctic regions requires new techniques, technologies and regulations to ensure safety, reliability and efficiency of design, production and transportation. This chapter presents the R&D studies made by Bureau Veritas in 2014.

The industry demand for large LNG carriers creates new challenges in design and operation. Bureau Veritas has carried out a set of assessment of the ship structure, including: assessment of the scantlings of the tank, full ship analysis with the finite Element method, analysis of ship hull torsion, buckling analysis and fatigue analysis for a LNG carrier with spherical tanks, of a capacity of 182,000 m3, the largest capacity ever built so far for this type of ships with spherical tanks.

New oil and gas recovery solutions have led to economic development of marginal fields or extended exploitation of existing ones beyond the original expected life. This leads to keeping the assets for a longer period thus requiring a life extension assessment. Nowadays it is fairly common to carry out numerical analyses in order to assess the structure of any to-be Floating Production Storage Offloading (FPSO) unit, be it new- built or converted from an existing oil-tanker. Bureau Veritas presents the available analysis that can define the structural needs for a safe operation and the state-of-the-art on conversion or life extension and examples of typical concerns that have been reported in converted units.

Innovation is an integral feature of the towing industry. Continuously new designs and technological solutions are developed to improve the capability, safety, reliability and efficiency of tugs. As merchant ships have rapidly increased in size, the latest generation of harbour tugs effectively combines high bollard pull, good manoeuvrability and indirect towing/escorting capability. This is particularly necessary for assisting ultra large container ships, which feature large windage area and high minimum speed through the water (even at dead slow ahead), which pose significant operational and safety challenges to the tug and the crew.

For offshore terminal operations, a fast growing market due to the increasing capex in exposed oil and gas terminals, economic considerations require high deployability of offshore terminal tugs in order to minimise operational downtime. Bureau Veritas provides an overview of the newly developed regulations for towing and anchor handling vessels together with their technical background and implications in terms of design and operation, as well as suggestions for further development of the regulations to further enhance safety and reliability.

As the oil and gas industry moves north to Arctic zones a state-of-the-art ice-modelling simulation tool has been developed in cooperation between Technip, Cervval and Bureau Veritas to optimize structure, to minimize ice loadings and ice rubble build-up, prior to final design verification in an ice test basin. The program is able to simulate ice loads acting on offshore units due to bending, crushing or mixed ice failure, to simulate ice flow around the structure and to predict ice encroachment.

Bureau Veritas has published a Rule Note NR620 which addresses specific requirements for LNG bunkering ships. LNG bunkering is not a new concept, but it has been brought to a different level by the teams of ENGIE together with its partners Nippon Yusen Kaisha (NYK) and Mitsubishi Corporation when announcing the order of the first LNG Bunkering Vessel in 2014. The specific BV notation “LNG bunkering ship” includes technical and functional requirements for the LNG transfer system. There are also operational optional suffixes for LNG bunkering ship with ability to take LNG from a gas-fuelled ship if necessary, to provide Inert Gas and Initial CD for a gas-fuel ship and to handle the BOG generated during bunkering.

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